Coming across "Eye To I" feels like a blast of fresh air. Erwin Blumenfeld, renowned as a fashion photographer of the 40th and 50th, gives us a merciless picture of what it takes to reach the top as an artist during the first half of the 20th century. With ferocious humor he settles his accounts with a world of pretense, prejudice and hypocrisy.

I simply loved this tale of our century. It's witty, iconoclastic, trenchant, hilarious, improbable all at the same time. The reviews I have read are, as usual bizarre: They miss the excellence of the translation, the breadth of Blumenfeld's vision, the fact that you can't put it down once you start & that it is simply a brilliant read. The author's recollections of his childhood in Berlin are simply astounding. His descriptions of WWI are full of th most incredible horror. His efforts to find himself in Amsterdam are hilarious. His rise in the world of fashion photography first in Paris and thn in New York bring us right into the middle of th 20th Century madness. For Blumenfeld's narrative is of a world gone mad. And who can deny that it has?

A truly modern photographer, Erwin Blumenfeld incorporates the artistic past of more than 20 centuries. That is the reason he will remain modern for many centuries to come. In his photos you will touch reminescences from Praxiteles to Picasso via Cranach, El Greco, Renoir and many other great artists brought alive in a new medium and a New World.

As a book this is a mediocre to poor presentation of an interesting mid-century photographer. The photographs are well reproduced and show a wide range of content and intent. Woman as sex object, woman as hardware, woman as mystified naked girl and anything else that fit Blumenfeld's fantasy.

The author is the son of the photographer who tries everything from freudian analysis to name dropping to make his father seem important. This detracts from the work. If you look at the photographs as the record of an artist who worked his way through Europe to New York over the middle 40 years of the twentieth century, you will find some art history and maybe some insight on how the artist evolved and how the craft changed over the most hectic time in its history.

Blumenfeld was a pragmatic professional illustrator. Most of his imagery is either derivative or based on tradition. Man Ray, Ruth Bernhard, and many others seem to have influenced him.

This is a good collection of different treatments of the nude female figure by an accomplished craftsman. It could serve as a starting point for thinking of how to or how not to approach the subject. Blumenfeld is at his best when he is simply doing graphic illustration and not "serious art". Some of it is warm and funny. His commercial work is very good and should stimulate other artists.

Just don't expect the unforgettable originality of Bernhard, Weston, Penn or their ilk.

I had my sister get me this book for Christmas so as to further my study of the nude. Knowing that the work inside was all about a half century or more old, I wasn't expecting highly innovative or original work but I indeed did find it. How stupid of me to think that his art work might be less fresh because he didn't have the photo equipment we now have or a computer. This study of his work is certainly proof positive that all an artist really needs is a first rate imagination! His fascination is the female nude. He "hides" that nude in some way in each shot but his results end up exposing the subject rather than obscuring it. Actually, it was a relief in many ways to see the art work of someone who was neither handicapped nor helped by state of the art machinery and equipment. Don't hold off buying this book because the work came from many earlier decades. The front cover image is very representative of the quality and content inside the book.

This book gives a wonderful survey of the photographer's "best" pictures and was designed by him and authored by a sympathetic Swiss photo-historian, Hendl Teicher.